Second Climate Survey of Biomedical PhD Students in the Time of Covid

  1. Deepti Ramadoss
  2. John P. Horn

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Abstract

In July 2021, sixteen months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the institutional climate for PhD training in the School of Medicine was assessed for a second time. This survey of graduate students occurred 1 year after initial surveys of graduate students and training faculty in July 2020. The 2021 survey was completed by 99 PhD students in 11 PhD-granting programs. To allow comparisons between years, most of the 2021 questions were repeated with only minor edits. A few items were added to assess impacts of school-wide town hall meetings, a new PhD career club program, and enlarged mental health services. Several themes emerged. Students remain extremely concerned about the pandemic’s impact upon their training and long-term career prospects. They worry specifically about pandemic related reductions in research productivity and networking opportunities. Many students successfully adapted to laboratory research under pandemic restrictions but suffer from the continuing lack of social interaction even after in-person work hours increased. Symptoms of anxiety and/or depression persist amongst 46% of the students, as compared to 51% in 2020. Nearly 80% of students continue to report strong satisfaction with mentoring relationships with their dissertation advisors, but to lesser extents with programs (66%), departments or centers (71%), the School of Medicine (32%) and the University (49%). Students (26%) express interest in the Ombuds office that was announced in late 2021. Some students wrote that the medical school could do a better job in embracing diversity and inclusion and in mentor training, and many stated that town hall meetings do not serve them well. Coping mechanisms shared by some students demonstrate impressive resilience. These results present a mixed picture. While aspects of biomedical PhD training have begun to recover as the pandemic continues, long-term consequences of the disruption raise challenges that must be addressed by efforts to restore and improve the learning environment required for 21 st century research education.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.13.476194: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: The survey was approved by the University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board (IRB), and was sent on July 8, 2021 to all PhD students registered in School of Medicine programs, and to students in programs administered jointly with the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and with Carnegie Mellon University.
    Consent: Participants gave informed consent before beginning the survey, which consisted of multiple-choice questions, and text boxes to make comments and/or elaborate on responses.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    BlindingIn subsequent analysis the authors were blinded to student identity.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The survey was approved by the University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board (IRB), and was sent on July 8, 2021 to all PhD students registered in School of Medicine programs, and to students in programs administered jointly with the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and with Carnegie Mellon University.
    Arts
    suggested: None

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.13.476194v1 on bioRxiv